I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”
 “Neither am I.”   
~God Help the Child, Toni Morrison

everybody knows lalala

"But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter, will remind you that you are not who you once were, for that person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an out-grown garment."

 --Rebecca Solnit
A Field Guide to Getting Lost

 "The Information: During the last seventy-two hours of a person’s life, there will be a discoloration of toes and kneecaps, a marked coolness of hands and feet. There will be mental confusion, and a mottling of the skin, which will start at the feet and progress up the legs. When mottling reaches the upper thighs, death is imminent. Two minutes after the heart stops beating, the person is still aware. This is what happens during the course of a natural death, an easy death. There are other scenarios—a bleed-out, for instance. If there is bleeding from the mouth and nose, we are to cover the blood with dark towels. There will be a large quantity of blood, and we want to spare the family the sight of it. If there is an internal bleed-out from a tumor in the esophagus, say, or a tumor in the lungs, there will be no visible blood. The instructor says if this is happening, we hold the patient’s hand and wait. Death will take only a few minutes. Hold the patient’s hand and wait. The simplicity is so moving. It strikes me that the physical details of the dying body are as intimate and predictable as those of the body making love." 
--Abigail Thomas
What Comes Next and How to Like It

"I do not want anything stirred up that I can’t handle by myself...but now, instead of being safe and sound and insulated against desire (shudder), I was suddenly thinking other kinds of thoughts, having other kinds of memories. I went and bought Guitar Town by Steve Earle instead of listening to my better self, and I even played it indoors because when I got home the kids were out. After a bit, and despite my new relationship with time, I began to experience impatience. One song at a time was taking too long. I began to wonder if there wasn’t some way I could cram all this music in at once. Oh hell. That’s called fucking." ~What Comes Next and How to Like It, a memoir by Abigail Thomas.

This book is pretty god damned funny, so I actually bought it after the kindle sample ran out and I'm now sitting in a half filled half fixed tub (o hot water how I love thee), giggling.

When my son listens to music, he looks down and his eyes move left to right as if he is reading. He is watching sound. There things like that about you, which only your mother observes and keeps.

"These notes have no intended audience, except for my conscience and God...It was if I had been flayed and my bowels exposed, inspected, groped, found wanting. It was not the judgment that had been passed on me, it was the fact of the exposure that disturbed me so. What was internal had been made external." ~John the Pupil

"weekdays"

"....it shook her to realize that some things, even those things far away from her in space and time, and especially those things that she loved, continued to exist, continued to endure. That anxiety and that wonder, mixed as they were, must be what love was." ~Prudence, David Treuer

   "According to the Biblical stories, Peter was Christ's closest disciple, but acted like a traitor when trouble came. After Christ was arrested, in the hours before the trial, Peter denied knowing his cherished teacher three different times. His fear trumped his love, leading him to violate his sacred commitment. Is there anything remotely comparable to that scenario developing in your own sphere, Virgo? If you recognize any tendencies in yourself to shrink from your devotion or violate your highest principles, I urge you to root them out. Be brave. Stay strong and true in your duty to a person or place or cause that you love."

"It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming." A Prayer Journal, Flanner O'Connor

"If this were a domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your fatal flaw—your memory, vessel of your feelings." ~Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine.

the growl at 2:10ish, the CourtneyCox-esque side shuffle dance near the end, all of it

"If friendship has a cost, then perhaps it is that at its heart there is always a burden of guilt." ~ In the Light of What we Know, by Zia Haider Rahman.

I woke up in the night thinking about that quote (from the book I started yesterday after I'd finished, finally, the painfully accurate Abandonment - yup, bonkers lock changing and painful extraction of self bits from idea-of-self like shards of glass from a cheese, I did all of it except stick my ass in the face of a weird neighbor thank god). For the eclipse, I had thought yesterday to doublecheck that I have no Gemini in my chart, and no, I have no air anywhere of any kind. Just Virgo (mutable earth) all day long with big dollops of Pisces (mutable water) and Leo (fixed fire). I am hot mud. You cardinal and air signs make no intuitive sense to me whatsoever. You are Other. You get mad, or sad, any kind of upset, even abruptly happy/moved, and just blow around so it seems to me, hot or cold air in my face. Like a stuckcrust I feel you all over me but it's on the outside, and I stir myself inside out to internalize it, a process that is often uncomfortable, occasionally/inevitably painful. To you, I must seem like a vast plain, my fluidity hidden from view, a distant threat of lava under quiet. You would have to be highly motivated to stick with me (on me), waiting as I churn. But blow away from me, and how does it feel? You leave me baked fetid, wanting your breeze. Do I go with you even as you think you're over me, grit in your veins?

Aoife O’Donovan: Hearts And Bones
bonus track Colin Meloy: Summertime it's still cold as balls outside, but hope springs eternal and I'll be seeing The Decemberists next week at UBCFA

Beautiful moment late last week when I realized this week was spring break. I gave the cuddle buddies a bath last night in anticipation of the nothing I'd be doing today. "Nothing", that's what most people call *reading*. I'm catching up on listening to some music at the moment (I love this version of 'Fever', but to be honest I love every version of it, like every kind of chocolate covered anything), still lying naked in bed, sipping coffee and reading the illustrated Thought Forms (Bessant) and trying to get through The Days of Abandonment (Ferrante), which gets a mixed review of it being too good to bear it more than a few sentences at a time, the narrator's mind trapped in self-referential habits of loss, dismantling itself. Meanwhile, Aaron just texted the news that he's losing his job by way of the facility he is at being closed.  Say la vee, I think. The Witch told me that would happen, more or less (FYI if you're a Gemini, a lunar eclipse is gearing up for a hit on 4/4, at which time you will abruptly lose something that you probably started getting rid of last year around this time, consciously or not - if you have Gemini in any of your houses, it will apply to you in that area of your life. If you forgot how to check that, refer back here for a basic natal chart.) Change scares me, everything scares me, but I wasn't always this way and it can't stay like that - he hates that job and so I must have faith that the universe is leading him (us) somewhere better. He cast his beer and I also cast my spell yesterday, I wrote it all over him like grapherotica, my intention to strain fear out of my lovethinking by handing over the power to him to heal (me), like agreeing to the surgery you've long held out against, and viola he loses his job before noon. Sooo, yea.

"And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself." ~ Days of Abandonment

"Affirmation"

To grow old is to lose everything. 
Aging, everybody knows it. 
Even when we are young, 
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads 
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer 
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters 
into debris on the shore, 
and a friend from school drops 
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us 
past middle age, our wife will die 
at her strongest and most beautiful. 
New women come and go. All go. 
The pretty lover who announces 
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. 
Another friend of decades estranges himself 
in words that pollute thirty years. 
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge 
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything. 

~Donald Hall

if these (inner) walls could talk..

I'm moving. New building, new office. I've had my office for, like, most of my adult life or something. Since before I bought my first house in Buffalo. I have tree rings of life in it, all that will be thrown away. So I spend an hour here and there, looking in a drawer.

the be good tanyas - in my time of dying (dylan)

"Whoever travels without a guide needs 200 years for a two-day journey." That's an old Sufi saying sometimes attributed to the poet Rumi. I don't think it's accurate in all cases. Sometimes we are drawn to wander into frontiers that few people have visited and none have mastered. There are no guides! On other occasions, we can't get the fullness of our learning experience unless we are free to stumble and bumble all by ourselves. A knowledgeable helper would only interfere with that odd magic. But right now, Virgo, I believe the Sufi saying holds true for you. Where you're headed, you would benefit from an advisor, teacher, or role model. 

Hmmmmm.

I went looking for the entry below, which I had unblogged as it turns out, I don't remember why, maybe trying to erase some of the damage done me by the final picture wherein my ovaries were kicking out 4-8 eggs per a month and exploding when I wrote it, when actually I became too sick to remake that trip. I just booked it again finally, which is why it's on my mind.

I didn't take the trip insurance this time.

_____________________
3/5/2012:
redux

That pic was taken by me, alone in a palatial hotel suite in Boston at the American Literature Association. It was half gambit, that trip. By half, I wanted and needed to attend the conference, to begin again to think academically, to write ... the other half was John, who seemed when I booked the trip months earlier to be finally willing to try to function, drive in a car together, stuff like that, and who by the time I needed the ride was long gone (again, and amazingly enough, finally). I took that pic to mark the time, my alone time, staring at ceiling and doing nothing but thinking. About all that I was missing in my life, which was not John actually. And I thought of all the people who had partnered and how I would not; I thought about Aaron, in Mexico that weekend, for instance. I thought about how the fact of not partnering was not, in itself, overly troubling to me. It was reception I was missing, an interlocutor .. I had lost the will and ability to build meaning on my own for everything, to tell the story of myself to myself alone, to decide everything and set the value for everything. I was not suffering from "o woe is me, I shall grow old alone", I was suffering from writing such a thing either as a joke or serious fear depending on TO WHOM I WAS WRITING, which had become, well, nobody. I mean, maybe someone is reading this, but nobody immediately implicated in the content or outcome. If I set my hair on fire, your pillow won't scorch. I don't need an audience so much as someone to wrestle with, to write for not just at. Otherwise, I can't keep from going to/too quiet. Now, Aaron does not read this blog, the writing I do for him I prefer to be in midair (alive). Does that count? (Am I writing?)

I am going back to Boston. Same conference. Only this time, I will have a partner with me and I will be giving a paper. I will have someone listening with interest to a paper I'm going to give about the concept of mating versus marriage, in literature ostensibly, my favorite author to whom I return for solace endlessly, whom I reread (this) again last night. I have yet to write that paper, I don't know what it will say, I don't know what it will matter that Aaron exits vis a vis what I will say, what I'll decide I think. I don't know more than I do know about many things. I don't know how it will turn out. What will my intellect do with Aaron with me there? How will that not matter, also? Everything has changed inside me since the last time I wrote and read aloud a 'treatise'. On this subject in particular, how mating and the spirit are entwined and at odds, every single cell in body has turned over since I left a husband who tried to kill me, passed through years with a lover whose indifference and chronic absence was infinitely gentle by comparison, and now to this place I am now, with much more that I cannot say (that I cannot write about at all, at least not yet) than I can in words I've found.

I have a pile of books in front of me right now. I'm looking at them, anxious not to be speechless.




redux (internal view)

"I will not wait to love as best as I can," says writer Dave Eggers. "We thought we were young and that there would be time to love well sometime in the future. This is a terrible way to think. It is no way to live, to wait to love." That's your keynote for the coming weeks, Virgo. That's your wake-up call and the rose-scented note under your pillow and the message scrawled in lipstick on your bathroom mirror. If there is any part of you that believes love will be better or fuller or more perfect in the future, tell that part of you to shut up and embrace this tender command: Now is the time to love with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind.  (armscrossy)

where do we begin the rubble or our sins, lalalaa

"Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful." Hippocrates (sounds like a Virgo horoscope)

bonus (better) track

In 1962, Edward Albee published his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It won numerous awards and is still performed by modern theater groups. Albee says the title came to him as he was having a beer at a bar in New York City. When he went to the restroom, he spied the words "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" scrawled in soap on the mirror. I urge you to be alert for that kind of inspiration in the coming days, Virgo: unexpected, provocative, and out of context. You never know when and where you may be furnished with clues about the next plot twist of your life story. 

Today's running mix started with and I think, 'she'll probably be better after a bout or two of [failed] rehab,' which brought me to
eyespy chet faker in the audience of that one (sitting to the right, in his knit hat), so repost: (that dude is hot) ...cool down

channeling some Annie magick

When she conjures the harmonica mid-spell - nice.  If I could do that, I'd be tempted to conjure an alligator-filled moat while I was at it, but she doesn't even need that. That look on her face at 5:26, hell, nobody in their right mind would fuck with her. 

M. doesn't live here anymore so I rarely get to see her. My loss. I'm grateful she still works here by proxy anyway from Bloomington. When she comes to town we begin talking mid sentence. The relationships you count on. Maybe or maybe not a number of people would call me if they needed bail. Who would I call? She'd be topping my (extremely you're-probably-not-on-it short) list. I have a torrent of words for her: ... there was the dog fashion show and a man there reminded me of my grandpa because he truly loved it but the rest clapped when the clapping time came and I was wondering my god when does the requirement to affirm the world on cue end (??) while at that time I was so frightened that I'd stopped feeling frightened, that's how acute it was at that point, like an ice burn, and I could feel Aaron buzzing my phone in my pocket worried about me running late and what that might mean but I couldn't respond because I was middogshow and the pug was wearing a tootoo and I needed to concentrate on what I was doing because I do not offload the problem of dying onto low wage workers to relieve (!), even though I'm there here in this job to get more of the dying to clap, and oddly they're right that I'm the right person for that job, though I have yet to convince my mate that the existence of an untangled inner life is not a wrong nor is rubbing salve-of-pugs on it for that matter. We are all going to die, none of coping with fears backwards is a failure, I like a crock pot stew and there's no crime in that. No crime in loving the pug in drag or not, either damn way, or a non pug related Way entirely if you can find a Way to authentically Be and inevitably Not Be at all. And it has zero to do with the normative narrative of marriage in our culture for God's sake that what I want is to actually be with the man and have access to his inner life(s)... She laughs and understands what I am saying, so little appetite anymore for sorting anything to judge it rather than to just *get it*. Once or many times, small or big things happened to him, a can of spaghettios he hammered opened and ate cold (or whatever), made him (like M.) anxious in particular ways. And that's all. There is no guilt in it. If you're guilty or believe you're not either, condemnation on your lips, frankly that entire framework seems too beside the point to engage with at all. Language fails me in ways it didn't used to or I didn't notice, then I might bawl. Like a baby. Maybe that's a kind of rebirth, she wonders. Yea, maybe.

---------------------------------


"According to your questionnaire responses, your attachment-related anxiety score is 4.22, on a scale ranging from 1 (low anxiety) to 7 (high anxiety). Your attachment-related avoidance score is 3.44, on a scale ranging from 1 (low avoidance) to 7 (high avoidance).  We have plotted your two scores in the two-dimensional space defined by attachment-related anxiety and avoidance. Your approximate position in this space is denoted by the blue dot.

As you can see in this graph, the two dimensions of anxiety and avoidance can be combined to create interesting combinations of attachment styles. For example people who are low in both attachment-related anxiety and avoidance are generally considered secure because they don't typically worry about whether their partners are going to reject them and they are comfortable being emotionally close to others. Combining your anxiety and avoidance scores, you fall into the region of the space. Previous research on attachment styles indicates that preoccupied people tend to have highly conflictual relationships. Although they are comfortable expressing their emotions, preoccupied individuals often experience a lot of negative emotions, which can often interfere with their relationships."


---------------------


I'm teaching myself attachment theory. (You can take the test yourself here.) So I can go to the principles office today and teach it to her. Because although they teach you that stuff in shrink school, they don't stress it because mostly nothing can be done about how you feel only how you act, so says Patti, who has little defense of these facts of her profession. (I can't defend my profession either, but still, grrrrr). Those feelings can change a lot - this I know because my blue dot has moved significantly. Our marriage has rewired me. So I'm putting my foot down. Give me ANALYSIS, whether it's "in" or not in counseling these days (armscrossy). My anger used to scare me and is still one of the things in myself and others that I least like to be around. But it's nothing compared to Grief. If I was difficult back when I was a standoffish beotch with my 'dismissive avoidant' blue dot, I'm 'anxious preoccupied' hell to pay now.  I go looking for Aaron's unconscious like a woman looking for my pair of tweezers at the bottom of a drawer.  

But there are definite upsides to the work of intimacy! I now actually like Valentine's day, for instance, aka do-something-together-that-make-you-nervous day.

Find that because you're doing it together, it's not scary at all!

"We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars... We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within the body." ~"Tear It Down", Jack Gilbert

give me things that I wanted to know lalala

.... was facilitating with a couple I will call Alice and Eric. Alice had had an affair, now over, and Eric had recently found out about it. Their purpose in therapy was to restore their relationship—that is, to rebuild trust. The therapy had been making it clear to all of us that it was extremely difficult for Eric to trust his wife again, even though she had voluntarily ended the other relationship and had made a sincere commitment to fidelity and to working things out. Enough time had elapsed so that it did seem reasonable—to all three of us—that Eric could at least begin to trust Alice again. But that was not happening, even after some rather intense therapy sessions. During a particularly poignant moment, Eric was crying and I suddenly realized that his issue was not about trusting Alice. It was bigger than that. It was about his inability to trust anyone fully. Eric’s grief in that moment was for all the betrayals in his life from childhood until now. His tears were about how each one had shut him down so that now, when trust was appropriate, he just could not summon it up. The fear that is natural in all grief had, for him, become more like a phobia. [ya]

For Alice it was a history of not being trusted—what became our next focus—in Eric’s presence. When a partner is sitting silently in the room where our personal work is being addressed and processed, we feel accompanied by her, and intimacy progresses in abundant ways. Within each session, I turned to the other partner and asked how she or he was feeling and what she or he saw in the work the partner did...The work for this couple was so primal, so basic, that it was like starting the whole relationship over again, not just recovering from the recent infidelity. I wondered how many couples are at that ground-floor level and don’t realize it...We all found out that the real starting point was opening the wounded trust from long ago and working toward healing that too. ~Daring to Trust, by David Richo, author or How to be an Adult in a Relationship

(The wife's truster was cracked and his was kinda fubar entirely.~from There are No Safewords in Real Life, by Wantdogski)

Fatty snorting like a creature. ~ A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride

..angrily, "Even a cow has horns."

I began praying whenever I thought of it—at my locker, during lunch, even in the middle of a quiz. I prayed more than I had ever prayed before, but I found it harder and harder to drift into the rhythm of sung prayers or into the nightly conversations with God. How could chanting and burning incense undo three minutes of a sunny August afternoon? It was like trying to move a sheet of blank paper from one end of a table to the other by blinking so fast that you started a breeze. [love that analogy]

I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on television in the living room. To me, the movie meant that if you become unhappy enough, almost anything can pass as happiness.

Why hadn’t people been nicer when it mattered? I wondered. [right?]

The quietness made me feel that the home was not as good as the hospital, that the nursing home was where the world put people who were not important, people who could be put away someplace and forgotten

The realization disturbed me. I saw that one day I would be nothing like who I was right then. I felt all alone

The sight of my mother in the kitchen caused my chest to hurt. Her belief that Birju could get better made me feel that she didn’t love us, that she valued believing something ridiculous over taking care of us, that she was willing to let us be hurt so she could have her hope.

I wanted us to be close, and so I began believing that we were.

At school, the guilt and sadness were like wearing clothes still damp from the wash. Whenever I moved, I felt as though I were touching something icy.

'I lie in my bed and listen to her cough and am glad she is coughing because this means she is alive. Soon she will die, and I will no longer be among the lucky people whose wives are sick. Fortunate are the men whose wives cough. Fortunate are the men who cannot sleep through the night because their wives’ coughing wakes them.' Writing the story changed me. Now I began to feel as if I were walking through my life collecting things that could be used later: the sound of a Ping-Pong ball was like a woman walking in high heels, the shower running was like television static. Seeing things as material for writing protected me. When a boy tried to start a fight by saying, “You’re vegetarian—does that mean you don’t eat pussy?” I thought this would be something I could use in a story..

As I wrote, I felt proud at my toughness for taking whatever was happening to me and turning it into something else.

Passing through the marshes covered in snow, I would have an aching sense of nostalgia. I was convinced that things would get worse and that one day I would look back on this period with longing. [right]

~all from Family Life.  I'm not sure I'd have given it the Booker, but it was pretty good.  

I didn't feel well all weekend, so I started rereading book 2 of the Harkness witch trilogy because book 3 just came out, so.  I wanted comfort reading, like raman with an egg.  Those are the books about witches written by an historian who throws in backstories to Marlowe plays etc, total schlockporn for PhD's in which I can wallow, going in and out of (simple) Latin and obscure references (I love a footnote!) to Malleus Maleficarum etc.  It strikes me reading it this time that book 2 is all about whether they're "really" married or not, the witch and the vampire, what constitutes that, whether a promise made to a witch is binding in itself or if his vampire-family has to approve. The witch moves through continents and centuries, staring down one vampire in-law after another, getting more and more pissed off, and then stronger.  Reading it, I feel like I did when I used to read those novels in which girls murdered their enemies and fed them to the rose bushes as mulch typa deal, when I was little-and-outraged.  Patti and I were just talking about this the other day, what it means, the series that tweens want in any given historical moment, which is now the Hunger Games series so it's all about resisting the state for tweens now, but when we were 12, it was all about personal disempowerment, and the longing for belonging punished cruelly and then wammo you were sorry you'd been such an asshole. We had read Carrie like it was the book of revelation.  

First it had been Ysabeau who's wished me out of her son's life.  Backwin has made no effort to hide his disdain.  Matthew's friend Hamish was wary of me and Kit openly disliked me.  Now it was Phillipe's turn. I stood and waited for Matthew's father to look at me.  When he did, I met his eyes squarely.  His flickered with surprise. .. ~Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness

Vanishing into books, I felt held. ~from Family Life, Akhil Sharma

I should be grading papers about Lydia Davis. Or I should go to yoga at noon.  I could be working on my story about the couple who buys a blow-up doll to play the part of the counselor in their DIY marriage therapy sessions, or writing an entry about this week's adventures with Low Tzu. But what I am doing is reading this book.

I cried so hard that I lost my breath. When this happened, I became detached from myself. I walked and gasped and, as I did, I could feel my unhappiness walking beside me, waiting for my breath to return so that it could climb back inside me.

In the mornings I prayed, and at night, when I was supposed to be sleeping but couldn’t, I spoke with God. One rainy night, the room was gray with light from the street and my mother was lying nearby, her breath whistling. I was on my strip of foam and I asked God whether he minded being prayed to only in need. “You think of your toe only when you stub it,” he said. “Still, it’s better to pray just to pray.” “It’s human nature. I don’t mind it.” God looked like Clark Kent...